The Real Answer to the Purpose of Life – QFramework Guide

Struggling to understand one’s place in the world is natural, but many say that there is no single purpose of life. While I believe that is partially correct, I also believe that it is more false than true. I’ll explain the roadmap to find your purpose and the thought behind how I landed on this answer.

Skip the rationale and jump to the QFramework here

Two Frames of Thought

At a high level, I believe there are two primary approaches to answer the question “What is the Purpose of Life”. A brief description of each is below.

Extrinsic Responsibility or Obligation

The first frame of thought revolves around a higher duty. Humans are here to do something specific. This could be living to make the world a better place, to explore, to learn, to build, to connect, etc. This is an ideological mindset that intends to develop a paradise while fulfilling our purpose of life.

Fulfilling Oneself

Take the same attributes as before and turn them inward, and you have the second frame of thought. We are here to grow and become the best person we can be. You are here to explore, build, connect, and make a name for yourself and leave some kind of legacy behind. Go have fun, have a family, enjoy life while you are here. You have ~100 years to experience the world, so experience it fully.

The Right Frame of Thought

The more I tossed these two mindsets around, the harder it was for me to be certain that there was a ‘right’ answer here. I feel like people should do more than just be selfish and fulfill ourselves, but I’m unsure if we really have a civil or public duty to give back. If we have an obligation or responsibility to make something meaningful, then who is that obligation to? Who can tell you factually if you are failing to meet that obligation? These questions made me think “nobody” and therefore – there is no obligation and one’s self-centered view may be correct. As I pondered this, I came up with the following situation that I could not overcome in this mindset.

Fill Your Potential – An Established Expectation

Imagine there is an individual filling a high status CFO position, and doing so at the top of their level. This CFO is doing something that few people can do, and doing so well. Despite this, the CFO is constantly struggling internally with their desires to be a cook and serve food. Is it the CFO’s obligation to fill the highest role that they can and provide the most value to the world or is it appropriate for them to be selfish, allow a less qualified individual to fill the role, and begin cooking?

I struggle with this as I believe folks should be filling their potential. It seems ‘wrong’ for someone that can do something amazing and challenging to opt for a less impactful role when others may not be able to fill the needed role (CFO in the above example). Then I asked myself “Is it actually wrong, or is it just unfortunate?” – This sent me down a different, yet productive path.

Epiphany of Self

My challenge to answer this question in a way that applies to everyone pushed me towards a simple yet compelling mindset. Purpose is defined by oneself. While wasn’t satisfying at first glance, the more I thought about it, the happier I became.

We have hundreds of different life philosophies, ethical frameworks, morals, religions, and worldviews. If there was a ‘right’ view, more people would have adopted it. With mass media and technology, awareness and access to these ideas are broad, so a particular mindset should dominate and drive life, but that is not the case. Therefore, I have happily accepted the idea that there is no one purpose of life. An individual’s environment, world view, morals, ethics, religion, etc. all play into their interpretation of purpose and nobody is necessarily right.

The Answer

This does answer the previous question of “What is the right frame of thought” since a conclusion has not been widely accepted. This means the ‘external’ frame of thought is wrong as there is no overarching obligation of all people to work towards a specific goal/outcome. The intrinsic view of life is correct, with caveats. An intrinsic view does not mean that one should abandon their morals and just do what is best for them. An intrinsic view is to chase happiness, whatever that is for the person, while taking into account their world view, ethics, morals, religion, etc. If one’s mindset is that everyone should make the world a better place, then they should:

1. Try to convince others why they are correct to increase their impact and spread their world view.
2. Do what they can to make the world a better place

Essentially, the self-focused or intrinsic mindset CAN still allow folks to have extrinsic views of purpose. Furthermore, folks with intrinsic views are not simply self-centered, careless people, rather they are operating within their morals to do what feels right to them. People will not simply going around murdering others because they are self-centered, since we still have morals and ethical values driving us.

All people should work to understand what their values are and what makes them feel that they are fulfilling their purpose of life. This means that everybody should be chasing happiness.

Finding Your Answer to the Purpose of Life – QFramework

Many people have already communicated broadly that you should do what makes you happy and you will be successful (including me). Despite that, I needed the reasoning and thought process to fully believe it. What is missing is the how. What framework can I follow to identify my purpose? Because I couldn’t find one, I challenged myself to develop one for others.

Step By Step – Finding Your Purpose

The Unusual – My Purpose is Obvious

Some folks simply know what they want to do. While uncommon, some of the most influential people in the world fall into this bucket. Some of the world’s massive success came from folks who found their purpose quickly and got to work. I believe these instances occur when someone has an inherent passion, vision, or problem that seems obvious for them to dedicate themselves to. This early and clear direction allows for exponential growth of certain individuals. If this is you, you likely don’t need the rest of this writing, but it may still be interesting to understand what the rest of us should think through.

Values Drive Purpose

As explained Earlier, one’s thoughts on purpose of life are heavily dependent on their values. Because of that, the first step should be identifying your values. This should not be challenging. The goal here is not to review hundreds of different world views and ethical frameworks to determine what feels right to you. The true goal is to understand what few things are deeply imbedded into you. Morals rooted in religious beliefs are commonly easy to pick out as some are clearly documented. Even in this case, ensure that there aren’t others and that your truly believe the values preached.

Determine Your Two Sources of Happiness

The QFramework proposes that there are two potential core sources of happiness at all times. These are excitement/entertainment + relaxation and either searching for roots of happiness or filling your happiness roots.

Excitement, Entertainment, and Relaxation are Essential

I do not believe it is possible for someone to be happy without some form of excitement or entertainment. I also do not believe that someone can be truly happy with only excitement and entertainment unless that a root of their happiness (I believe this to be very unlikely). If one is constantly entertained and excited, overtime they will become bored and feel purposeless. Despite that, it is critical to identify the things that excite, entertain, and relax you so those acts can be built into your routine. List out all the things that you do for excitement, entertainment, and relaxation.

Interestingly, I believe that some folks don’t understand the difference between the happiness driven from excitement, entertainment, and relaxation and happiness the comes from root sources. I might write more about this in the future…

Identify Your Roots of Happiness

A root of happiness is a concept I developed for the QFramework to help answer the questions “What is the purpose of life”. These roots play the primary role into ensuring long-term happiness. Think through the things that make you happy and write them down. Make sure to spend adequate time to brainstorm so you have a list of things that make you happy deep down, not just in the moment. Once you have that list, remove anything that is entertainment based. Those items should be accounted for in the above section and are distinctly different from the things that make you happy or times you have been happy.

For example, I enjoy watching football and it makes me happy. That is an excitement/entertainment happiness rather than true happiness. On the other hand, when I was called out at our company meeting for something I created that was deemed to create significant value, I was truly happy deep down, and this feeling persisted. Once you have those items listed, think through the human root of what made you happy. In my example, I wasn’t necessarily happy I created something valuable, I was more happy about the recognition and praise I received. You should go through this same process for things that take away your happiness or make you unhappy. At the end of this exercise you should have a list of core feelings that drive your happiness.

Searching for Roots of Happiness

If you cannot identify roots of happiness, it will be challenging to truly identify your purpose of life. What you can do to feel happiness in the mean time, is search for and chase down those roots. Deliberately taking action to get out of your comfort zone and explore to find something that moves you will inherently feel purposeful and fill you with meaning until your identify the roots. This could be taking a trip with the intention of exploring, learning, and connecting rather than relaxation, this could be taking a seminar on something you know little or nothing about, or this could be positioning yourself around other highly passionate people and see if their passions grow on you. There are countless ways to experience something new. These things will keep you out of an entertainment cycle that may lead to underlying unhappiness.

Developing a Plan to Fill Your Purpose of Life with the QFramework

At this point you should have an understanding of the values you hold close and the roots of your happiness (both things that increase and decrease happiness). These will become the variables in the QFramework to model your purpose. Now comes the most challenging part of the process…

Weights

The next step is to weigh each indicator of happiness and unhappiness on a scale of 1-10. This means each of your roots should have a number assigned where 1 means it is less impactful to your happiness and 10 is more impactful. Assume all your values (not the roots of happiness) have infinite weight, meaning that you should never go against your core values. Here is an example of how this could look:

If I really care about world impact, care a moderate amount about public approval, and care a little bit about environmental impact while heavily looking to avoid public disapproval, the following may be appropriate:

• World Impact – 8 (Positive)
• Public Approval – 6 (Positive)
• Environmental Implications – 3 (Positive)
• Public Disapproval – 10 (Negative)

This can now be used to model decisions and compare options to determine what aligns closest to your purpose. For each of these variables add/subtract the weight if the decision applies to your root. For example, if I have an incredibly positive and impactful decision that has extremely minimal positive impact on the environment that I expect to have an extremely negative public reaction to, I may have the following:

8 (8/8 World Impact)

+ 0 (0/6 Public Approval)

+ 1 (1/3 Environmental Implications)

– 10 (10/10 Public Disapproval)

= -1

Since the result is negative, we would decide this goes against our purpose of life and we should not proceed. This is also a great way to determine the best available option between multiple courses of action. To format your QFramework purpose of life document, you can follow something similar to this table:

Getting the weights can be challenging, especially so the positive roots and negative roots of happiness are balanced. For an example on how to do this, you can see my QFramework below.

My Purpose – QFramework

Natural

I do not have an inherent passion, vision, or problem, so I will continue with the QFramework.

Values

My values are heavily rooted in logic rather than a specific ethical or moral code. Because of this, there are few things I truly consider values for myself. Some would be:

• Everyone should bring something to society (work or have worked in the past)
• Doing good for you at the unnecessary expense of others is not doing good for you.
• Acceptance is one of the most important attributes a person can have. We all have different views, and if you cannot respect others’ views, whether you agree or not, you must at least accept that and move on.

Entertainment, Excitement, and Relaxation

I made a list of activities/concepts that I gain entertainment enjoyment from. A few are:

• NFL
• Video Games
• System Modeling and Analytics
• Certain Shows
• My Dog
• Exploratory Thought
• Appreciation of Others’ Work (Fan created content)

I will incorporate these into my routine to ensure that I am adequately balancing my growth and progress with relaxation/recovery time.

Roots of Happiness and Unhappiness

There are many examples used to develop my core roots. Here are a few:

• Every kickoff I’ve touched has been returned for a touchdown (limited attempts and at a young age)
  • Recognition
• I was the top seller of fundraiser items at my first job.
  • Recognition
• After a funeral I was told secondarily that my lengthy and thoughtful condolence card moved the family.
  • Appreciation
• I receive regular praise for my work at my full-time career.
  • Recognition
• I’ve shown others things they haven’t seen before but find incredibly useful and begin to use on a regular basis.
  • Appreciation
• I wrote a letter to a veteran whom I’m related to and was told they were moved to tears (they aren’t normally emotional).
  • Appreciation
• I accidentally sent an important email to someone on my team rather than the CFO with the same name. They notified me one month later that they needed the document.
  • Dissapointment
• After my knee surgery, I was no-longer able to run the times I was able to before, letting my track coach down.
  • Dissapointment
• Despite ample time, effort, and awareness, I have not established a self-sustainable business.
  • Disappointment

The things that I remember and feel the most happiness from seem to stem from appreciation and recognition while disappointment is my largest reductor of happiness.

Root Weights

I’ve come up with the following weights for my roots of happiness:

• Appreciation [3]
• Positive Recognition [8]
  • Implies impact – I am doing something worth recognition, therefore, there was impact made.
• Disappointment [10]

3*Appreciation + 8*PositiveRecognition – 10*Disappointment

Optimizing and Planning

I intend to use this model to evaluate decisions and ensure I have a good balance of entertainment and growth as I have struggled with this in the past. Some of my immediate areas I plan to explore are: Career path (both my largest opportunity for recognition and disappointment), Appropriate Entertainment Costs (potential source of disappointment), and new opportunities to overlay my positive roots of happiness.

QFramework Summary – The Purpose of Life

The QFramework helps folks identify their purpose. Here are the general steps of the QFramework:

Step-by-Step Guide:

1. Do you have a passion, vision of the future, or problem that you‘re already aware of?
   • If so, pursue that! Else, continue on.
2. Identify your core values.
   • Examples: Religion, ethics, morals, world view, etc.
     • You don’t need to go out and review every iteration of these, but for the concepts you have formed, document them so you operate within them.
3. Make a list of all activities that entertain, excite, and relax you.
   • Ensure these are built into your routines. Chasing roots of happiness alone can cause burnout.
4. Identify your roots of happiness and unhappiness.
   • To do this, list out all the things that leave you happy or unhappy. You can think of specific events or wholistic concepts. Take this list and identify the underlying humanistic cause of your happiness.
     • Rather than “I got a bonus and the money made me happy” a longer term introspection may be “The recognition and validation of my hard work made me happy”. Try to make a broad, sweeping (yet true) statement about why that made you happy.
   • If you cannot generate this list, focus on searching for and identifying these roots. Actively work to find these to avoid a cycle of entertainment (temporary happiness) and frustrations. Revisit these steps when you identify a few roots of happiness.
5. Weigh each root of happiness/unhappiness with 1 being low impact on your happiness and 10 being high impact.
6. Put it all together and optimize for happiness!
   • When making decisions, evaluate how well they align with your purpose to make the decision most likely to make you happy and fulfill your purpose.
   • Ensure you do not break your overall values, or the model will fall apart.
   • Incorporate your entertainment/excitement/relaxation activities into your schedule to ensure a good balance of working towards your purpose and taking a break.

Takeaways

While this may be an imperfect model, it is what works best for me and seems broadly applicable. The QFramework is a promising model to establish and align with one’s purpose of life. If you have questions, considerations, or feedback. Please reach out as I am always happy to connect.

Find other pieces about humans wholistically here!